High Fashion You Wouldn't Want To Blast Off In Last Year's Outfit, Would You?

June 30, 1985|By Rita Cipalla

The crew of the spacecraft Columbiad was a bit unusual: three men, two dogs and a couple of chickens, fired into lunar orbit from the Florida coast. Their craft itself was the epitome of fashion -- Victorian fashion, that is -- with thickly padded walls, a circular divan and a dome-shaped roof, a far cry from today's space shuttle Columbia or any other modern spacecraft.

The three adventurers and their crew were the stars of Jules Verne's classic 19th-century novel, From the Earth to the Moon and Round the Moon. ''Why cannot we walk outside like the meteor?'' exlaims Michel, one of the voyagers. ''What enjoyment it would be to feel oneself thus suspended in ether, more favored than the birds who must use their wings to keep themselves up!''

Michel and his friends lacked space suits, but today's astronauts have no such laments. Protected by a multi-layered pressurized space suit, the most complex garment ever made, they routinely venture into space.

Although space travel is relatively recent, ''the idea of space suits is not,'' says Linda Neuman Ezell, a historian and associate curator for manned space flight at the Smithsonian's Naitonal Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. ''In fact, there are startling similarities between some early science fiction space suits and the suits of today.''

The forerunner of the space suit was the pressure suit, designed for more earthbound adventures: deep-sea divers, balloonists and mountain climbers. In 1911, Dr. J.S. Haldane, a well-known English respiratory physiologist, led an expedition to Pikes Peak in Colorado to study the effects of low atmospheric pressure on climbers. Following his trip, he proposed the use of an oxygen- pressurized suit to allow mountain climbers to ascend to high altitudes.

Haldane's research led, in 1933, to England's first pressure suit ensemble, a modified diving suit. (The factors involved in safe ascension from the depths of the sea to its surface are the same as those that apply to survival at high altitudes.) Mark Ridge, a 27-year-old balloonist and daredevil from Dorchester, Mass., tested the suit in a low-pressure chamber where a simulated altitude of 90,000 feet was reached.

During the 1930s, aviators around the globe competed for altitude and speed records, but they were restricted by altitude limitations. Above 40,000 feet, the limit for unpressurized flight, the lungs cannot absorb sufficient oxygen to replenish the bloodstream.

The world's first practical flight pressure suit grew out of the long- distance, high-altitude flying interest of noted American aviator Wiley Post. In 1934, Post asked the B.F. Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio, to help him develop a pressure suit. ''For all serious altitude flying,'' Post said at the time, ''it is necessary to maintain pressure around the body by sealing off space and pumping air into it.'' This principle remains the basis for all subsequent pressure suit development.

Post's first pressure suit, built for about $75, used a rubberized parachute fabric and an aluminum helmet. But when the suit was tested in a low-pressure chamber, it sprang a leak, then burst. Modifications were made, but suit No. 2 fared little better. While trying it on, Post, who had gained a few pounds since the first suit, got stuck, and the suit had to be cut off him.

Success came with the third suit, which consisted of three layers -- long underwear, an inner rubber bag to contain oxygen under pressure and an outer, cloth-contoured suit. On March 15, 1935, Post, wearing the new suit, flew from Burbank, Calif., to Cleveland, Ohio, in 7 hours, 19 minutes, breaking previous speed records.

As flight technology developed from airplanes to jets to spacecraft, the requirements for protecting pilot and crew changed as well. From the early 1940s on, when it became possible to pressurize aircraft cabins, the pressure suit became a secondary back-up system. It was only with the first space walk in 1965 that the suit became a primary protection system. During these two decades, however, at least 30 major types of pressure suits were designed and constructed.

The T-1 suit, built for the Air Force in 1949, protected pilots against loss of consciousness should the aircraft cabin suddenly decompress. That same year, with Navy support, Goodrich improved Wiley Post's pressure suit by reducing its bulk and increasing its mobility and ventilation. The new suit was called the Mark IV.

The XH-5 pressure suit, made in 1943 by Goodrich for the Army Air Forces, resembled today's space suit more than the others. Its designer, Russell S. Colley, figured out how to improve the suit's mobility after observing the crawling motions of a tomato worm. The XH-5 suit had bellows modeled after the segments of the worm's body.